Benjamin Williams Leader

Benjamin Williams Leader (1831 – 1923) was an English landscape painter. In 1854, at the age of 23, he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy Schools in London. Leader's early works bore the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites with their attention to fine detail and emphasis on painting from nature "en plein air". In his later years he adopted a looser style which was more impressionistic rather than being an exact copy of nature and this proved to be more popular.